“Pandora offers two services that Apple will likely obviate soon: (1) free randomly selected music on the cloud with interspersed advertisements and (2) paid randomly selected music on the cloud with no advertisements,” Derek C. Cheung writes for Seeking Alpha.
“Apple’s iTunes already has a feature called Genius that recommends songs to users just as Pandora’s Music Genome Project,” Cheung writes. “Unlike Pandora, Genius works only with tracks already owned by the iTunes user and therefore it cannot recommend tracks that the user doesn’t own. The appeal of Pandora is that it allows its users to discover music they are likely to enjoy, based off of their selection of songs and artists they already like.”
“Do you think the imaginative people at Apple can’t put Pandora out of business tomorrow? After the announcement of iCloud at WWDC, people should put two and two together. iCloud will provide every Internet-connected device with access to the world’s entire music library. Then if iCloud comes with the Genius feature, Pandora has no reason to exist. Apple can choose to run ads, too, or it can charge a fee,” Cheung writes. “It gets worse. If iTunes Match is approved by the big four music studios (yes, it’s a big if), people will download pirated music, gain iCloud access to the legitimate files and their only expenditure on music will be $25 per year–paid to Apple.”
“The interesting thing about iCloud is that it is being announced before Apple’s official endorsement of 4G. Apple has an intelligent habit of embracing technologies and formats only after they become generally accepted. Now that Apple has become so successful, this habit has become reflexive–new technologies cannot become generally accepted until Apple embraces them. So even though you see all these 4G advertisements everywhere, the technology has not yet become mainstream, Cheung writes. “Apple’s iCloud push is going to ensure that 4G becomes mainstream. And not only that. Apple will be the first company to make cloud computing mainstream.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: iTunes Match is already approved for the over 18 millions songs in iTunes Store’s catalog. iTunes scans and matches your music with the 18 million songs in the iTunes Store — and automatically stores them in your iCloud library. So chances are your music is already in iCloud.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward Weber” for the heads up.]